From Moscow With Love

By

Sally McGrane

Nov. 8, 2012 4:43 p.m. ET

Strolling through Moscow's newly renovated Gorky Park on a recent autumn morning, three young Muscovites point out clusters of giant outdoor lounge pillows, Wi-Fi hotspots and a couple of 20-somethings in skinny jeans playing pétanque. "This must be the new thing for Moscow hipsters," observes 25-year-old Galima Akhmadullina, as she casts an expert eye on the men. "Last year it was ping-pong."

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St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square
Russ Images / Alamy

Ksenia Zemskova, a 31-year-old yogini, points to a broad wooden deck along the river. "Here, you can practice yoga, or take tango classes," she says. "And in the winter, the park is covered in ice, so you can ice skate. It's really beautiful!"

When Western tourists think of easy travel destinations, they seldom think of Moscow. A complicated, bureaucratic visa process that requires an invitation from a tourist company, private individual or business, and the fact that the city is both expensive and difficult to get around for non-Russian speakers mean that most visitors who come from the West do so either on business or with a tour group.

"Russia is still one of the most foreign countries for Western tourists," says Sergei Millian, president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in New York. "If you come without a tour guide and without having studied Russian, it could be very difficult to navigate."

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Ice skating in Gorky Park
RIA Novosti / TopFoto

But that may be changing. In March, Moscow's Committee for Tourism launched an official tourist website (en.travel2moscow.com) to address what they cite as one of the city's most acute tourism challenges: the fact that few visitors know where to go in Moscow. The government site, in English, German and Russian, provides basic information about visiting the capital, as well as details for a wide variety of tourist attractions, from the Kremlin to "Vivacello," an international cello festival.

It joins a small group of online resources for English-speaking visitors like Waytorussia.net and WowMoscow.net, which also launched in March. A private tourism portal recasting the city as a fun, cool place to visit, WowMoscow was founded by Alexander Pershikov, 32, Alexander Sapov, 29, and Andrey Khazin, 43. The site hopes to make it easier for tourists—particularly but not exclusively from the West—to enjoy Moscow independently. It also offers apps, maps and Foursquare lists of hip clubs, restaurants and galleries, as well as providing services such as helping visitors get a visa or book hotels.

The three men, who work for Moscow-based Kremlin Multimedia, which is funding the site, say they recognized a dearth in the market of the kind of comprehensive English-language resources that would obviate the need for a package tour or a hotel concierge. "Two years ago, there was nothing out there," Mr. Pershikov says. When the trio started looking into the size of Moscow's tourist market, it was smaller than they expected. Still, they saw an opportunity: "Moscow doesn't have a brand," Mr. Pershikov says.

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A WowLocal volunteer
Nikita Bogdanov

Helene Lloyd, director of TMI Consultancy, a London-based communications company with operations in Moscow, says that Russia, like most countries in the former Communist bloc, still has a learning curve when it comes to things like branding. "Only in the last few years has Moscow been understanding its tourism potential," she says. "It's a wealthy city. Moscow does want to attract tourism, but they're more like London or Paris—they're not desperate for tourism."

Alexey Volov, director of sales and marketing at the InterContinental Moscow Tverskaya Hotel and a member of the advisory committee to the Tourism Department of Moscow, says these initiatives are helping the city move forward. "Competition will be pushing the official portal to develop faster and be more aggressive," he writes in an email, "and in the end, this is exactly what Moscow needs in terms of putting itself on the international travel market."

Inspired by campaigns like "I amsterdam" (whose website WowMoscow closely resembles) and "I Love New York," part of WowMoscow's goal is to recast the capital in a contemporary context. "We're the newer generation," says Ms. Akhmadullina, the company's spokeswoman. "We travel a lot, and we're not satisfied with the image our country has abroad, or with the image of our city. We want to say: It's not as scary as you think. We have great culture, and our city is really kind of awesome."

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Moscow's Velonotte cycling night.
Courtesy Moskultprog Archives

The site offers information about walking tours, off-road weekend getaways and urban happenings like Velonotte—an architectural tour on bicycle at night, for which Moscow closes streets to car traffic once a year in May. For this year's Velonotte, WowMoscow hired a translator and organized headphones so that English-speaking bicyclists could follow along. "You shouldn't be cut out just because you don't speak Russian," says Ms. Zemskova, head of WowMoscow projects. "Events like that, we want to make them more accessible."

Beyond the site itself, WowMoscow has a series of initiatives, including a museum pass, coming in December, and the "WowLocal" project. "The city has a project where volunteers come to Arbat or Red Square"—both major tourist attractions, says Irina Tripapina, who organized the effort. "They stand in one spot looking for lost tourists, then they give them a map. I thought, we need to have more people like that, and we need people everywhere."

In September, WowMoscow offered outdoor English lessons in Gorky Park for Muscovite volunteers, who, after having passed a six-question written test, received a T-shirt that reads "Ask Me I'm Local." The idea is that they can simply slip these on, whenever and wherever they are. So far, there are 500 WowLocal volunteers, most of whom are in their 20s. One of them, 27-year-old Mikhail Novikov, wore the T-shirt over his dress shirt during his lunch break. "I like English. I love my country. I love Moscow. I like foreign people and I like to speak to them," he says. "And, of course, it often happens that they need help from strangers on the street."

Corrections & Amplifications:

Alexander Sapov is one of the founders of WowMoscow. An earlier version of this story incorrectly spelled his surname as Sopov.

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